Saturday, May 31, 2014

I decided to go with the Tron version of Daft Punk for this piece. I dug the visuals from Tron Legacy, and the soundtrack that Daft Punk did for the flick is the perfect music to paint to.

On the topic of painting, it was fun to go with a monochromatic palette to try and capture that Tron vibe. If I had more time I would have dusted off the old airbrush to get some nice glow effects. This was also an attempt at a looser and faster approach I might look more into, just to change things up a bit. Must experiment.

Thursday, May 01, 2014

This year is the 20th anniversary for Hellboy, and Hero Complex Gallery, in LA, is having a huge group show to celebrate it, this Friday night. Hellboy is easily one of my favorite comic characters. If you've never read the comics, they're totally worth tracking down. I remember seeing a sketch Mike Mignola did of the character, before anyone ever knew who Helboy was. I'll get to that in a minute.

Here's how the piece came out framed. Really happy with how it turned out.

So, back in the 90's, it was either Portland or Sand Diego con, and a buddy of mine came back excited that he got a sketch from Mike Mignola, but neither one of us recognized the character. It looked like The Thing with goggles on his head, but my buddy told me it was a new character Mignola was working on. Anyway, that was the year that Dark Horse was announcing their new imprint called LEGEND. This was the line where Mignola launched Hellboy.

I remember going to a panel where they announced the new Legend books. Also on the panel for the new imprint were, Frank Miller, Art Adams, John Byrne, and Geoff Darrow. These guys! Anyway, it was super exciting, but long story short, Dark Horse pulled an Oprah and asked everyone to look under their seats. A lucky group of comic nerds, myself included, had little Easter Island heads hidden under their seats. This was the logo for the new line of books. Check it out here.

Ok, that's the short version of the story. It's pretty amazing how long Hellboy has been around. Guillermo del Toro did an amazing job with the movies and making Hellboy a house hold name. Everyone out of my nerd circles only knows him from that, and after tomorrow night's show, hopefully, Hellboy will be reintroduced to some new fans. Congrats on 20 years Mr. Mignola. Keep those stories coming!